A few weeks ago, Novell and Red Hat jointly fended off a patent infringement suit thrown their way by a patent troll. The patent in question more or less came down to the concept of virtual desktops - and thanks to Groklaw, several people helped in finding cases of prior art. The most interesting one of all? A carefully restored and working Amiga 1000 demonstrated to the judge and jury.

Had Commodore managed to do RTG themselves for the OS3.2/4.0 plans back then, then only the CPU transition to PPC would have been problematic. Dealing with RTG could indeed be troublesome, but it was at least fixable by hand. I wouldn't dare to do the same on a Linux system.

Except of course, Commodore was not going to PowerPC at all. They were going to PA-RISC instead, and it was the collapse of Commodore which led HP to instead take their next-gen PA-RISC technology and bring it to Intel, which turned it into Itanium. Unlike Intel, which viewed the technology as a way into the big-iron market, Commodore was viewing it as a way to recapture the glory they had with the 6502, a solid 32/64-bit cheap CPU that can run on anything, much the same as ARM became.

While the "Going PPC" route did come to be, it was not what Commodore had planned, not even on the radar. Where they were going was far more interesting than that.